Originally serialized in Hit Comics from 1977 to 1987, Galaxy Express 999 is part of Leiji Matsumoto's larger universe. The story centers on Tetsuro, an orphaned street urchin who dreams of catching a ride on the titular space-train in search of a mechanized body and eternal life. He gets his chance when a mysterious woman named Maetel offers him a ticket - if he will travel with her along the way.

The 21-volume original manga run spawned several TV shows, movies and OVAs, spanning nearly three decades:

The first TV series, Galaxy Express 999, aired from 1978 to 1981, with essentially the same storyline as the manga.

A full-length animated feature was released in 1979; this was a greatly condensed version of the TV series.

Adieu Galaxy Express 999, the second feature film, came out in 1981. A sequel to the events of the first movie, this was the first advancement past the original manga's storyline.

After a break of nearly 20 years, Matsumoto wrote a second manga series in the late 1990s, continuing the story from Adieu.

A third, shorter film titled Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy was released in 1998. The story is drawn from events in the second manga series.

Maetel Legend, a prequel to the original story, was released in 2000 as a two-part OVA.

Space Symphony Maetel, a 13-episode series released in 2004 as a follow-on to Maetel Legend.

To date, only the first two movies, a portion of the second manga series and Maetel Legend have had a widespread release in the U.S./Region 1. (The TV series was subtitled by Nippon Golden Network and available in areas of the US with a high ethnic Japanese population.) A... somewhat liberal translation of the first movie was released in 1981, but we aren't going to talk about that. The translation work since then has been considerably more faithful to the source and (big surprise) much more enjoyable for it. Crunchyroll is currently streaming a subtitled release of the entire original 1978 TV series.

S'more Entertainment has announced that they will release the Galaxy Express 999 tv series as a sub-only DVD release in North America.

Tropes:

Adaptation Distillation: The 1979 movie. It cuts out much of the unnecessary melodramatic elements of the original series to focus on the core story-arc, while at the same time expanding on Tetsuro's quest to get revenge on Count Mecha.

Informed Attribute: Maetel is universally considered the less dangerous of the two sisters, yet Emeraldas has a lesser body count, at least since Maetel blew up a planet in response to an attempted Grand Theft Me.

Big, Fat Future: The second Big Bad in the manga conquers Earth by offering enough free food to cause this. There is also a planet where people are so fat they completely fill houses that explode as the occupant keeps expanding.

Broken Masquerade: The ironically named "Future Planet", which has 20th century technology and the Galaxy Express 999 is kept a secret from the general population, by the end of the arc a group of teenagers have taken pictures of it and plan on publishing them on their newspaper.

Collapsing Lair: buildings, castles, even planets may explode upon the owner's death.

Colonized Solar System: The first half dozen episodes or so are all set within the solar system, with stops on Mars, Titan, and Pluto.

Or Cool Starship, depending on whether you view the 999 as a space-going train or a train-like spaceship. Exceedingly cool, either way.

Crapsack World: Most of the planets Tetsuro and Maetel visit are in various states of decay. By the time of Adieu, Galaxy Express 999, Earth has devolved into a state of perpetual war between humans and machines.

A planet named Imbecile is apparently the worst of the lot, according to Maetel. Thankfully we never saw it...

Discovering Your Own Dead Body: In an episode, Tetsuro watches from afar as his enigmatic guide and companion Maetel weeps over a dead body under ice on Pluto. It is later more or less confirmed that it is Maetel's own original, pre-robotization body.

Fanservice: Iconic as it is, Maetel takes off that coat pretty regularly. One of the eyecatches is her swimming in a bikini alongside a train in space.

Fan Disservice: Count Mecha disrobing and admiring the new human trophy that is Tetsuro's mother.

Flashback: Tetsuro remembers life with his mother from time to time, along with her death.

Friendly Rivalry: Emeraldas is revealed to have had this going on with Maetel in her original introduction in GE999: the two of them dueled to a draw in the past, but have otherwise been very fond of each other, taking pictures together and such. Unlike the android Emeraldas, the real one would never actually want to harm Maetel, and she refuses to meet Maetel face-to-face while not at full strength due to illness. This was long before the two of them became sisters, mind you.

Maetel's a pretty complicated one. Because of the L/R ambiguity in Japanese it can be interpreted as either coming from the Latin word for mother, or the English word metal (or possibly the Mattel toy company) both of which hint at her artificial nature.

Word of God says that her name was meant to read "Maeter" and derived from the Latin word "mater," which means "mother."

Noble Savage: Utterly and totally averted. The first time we see a genuinely low-tech population, they are brutal savages who practice recreational torture and human sacrifice. We meet other savage types later on, and they're not all that great either.

Only Six Faces: Suffers from this quite badly. Practically every young female character is a clone of Maetel and all old people have the strange body quirk of having their eyes above their forehead. While Tetsuro looks pretty distinct, there's approximately one face (and haircut) for every other young male of his age. Possibly lampshading this trope, Tetsuro does meet a man who has his exact face and almost an identical name. The only sort of plot relevance it has is to note how odd it is and make them fast friends.

Reality Ensues: One planet was literally split in half by its inhabitants so that one half contained the modern civilized citizens and the other, the primitive savages; almost immediately after doing it, the "civilized" half exploded by collapsing on its own mass, and the other half also explodes before the episode ends.

Ramen Slurp: Tetsuro eats ramen at every opportunity, though he treats synthetic noodles as a last resort. He usually eats it by inhaling an entire bowl in one big noodly mass.

She Is Not My Girlfriend: Surprisingly, despite the age difference, more than a few characters assume that Tetsuro and Maetel are a couple, Tetsuro is always flustered by it and repeatedly denies it.

Space Is an OceanA Railroad: The Three-Nine runs through outer space as if on tracks. Harlock commands a battleship, while Emeraldas gets a bit more... Bizarre: A wooden sailing ship, suspended from a giant... Space-blimp sort of... Thing.

Then again, they keep referring to space as the Sea of Stars.

Not to mention people walking along the outside of spacecraft without protection. Lampshaded when Tetsuro is baffled to hear the sound of distant church bells as the 999 approaches a planet. Maetel explains that the inhabitants are so arrogantly pious that they assembled a vast array of gravitational wave emitters on the surface, which broadcast an intense graviton carrier wave precisely modulated to induce a resonant vibration in the bulkheads of passing spacecraft which replicates with perfect fidelity the sound of distant church bells. Impressed, Tetsuro rolls down the window and sticks his head out to get a better look.

Transhuman Treachery: A major recurring theme in all of Matsumoto's stories is that Cybernetics Will Eat Your Soul, and once you succumb to the temptation of living forever in an inhumanly strong and fast mechanical body, you will quickly lose your connection to humanity and become its worst nightmare. It's not universal, but even characters who accept cybernetics for the noblest of intentions often turn into the worst villains, e.g. Queen Promethium, as depicted in Maetel Legend.

Villain with Good Publicity: This trope is practically the hat of the Machine Empire. Virtually every world in two galaxies sees them as the wave of the future. Even the protagonist, who watched his own mother being brutally gunned down by Machine-Humans, simply concludes that if he'd been a Machine-Human himself, he would have been powerful enough to stop them.

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